How can AI be used to more reliably analyze and plan around the tie between climate and emissions?
Can AI provide a more reliable analysis of the gross effects of carbon emissions on extinctions of species ice-cap melting, and other effects?
Yes. The work of Judea Pearl and others over the last 20 years began out of a desire to address uncertainty within AI. Eventually, this led Pearl to become fascinated by the need to quantifiably determine when one event has caused another, the problem at the root of &quot;correlation is not causation&quot;. He substantively succeeded with the combination of causal modeling and the do-calculus. The do-calculus allows you to formulate queries of the form &quot;To what degree did X cause Y?&quot;, and to automatically determine what measurements are needed to determine the answer in a statistically meaningful way. The algorithms used under the hood are closely related to those used in AI and robotics systems to reason about uncertainty (i.e. Bayesian Inference). Causal modeling is still relatively new, and is not yet as widely used as it could be. An open problem is how to specify what the model of the world looks like from data (rather than just reasoning over a model that is given). If this problem is solved, we could see major improvements in the ability to provide analyses like those you ask about.
Can AI provide a better understanding about whether the runaway scenario described by some climatologists is realistic?
Probably not. Predicting future events without any observable precedents is not something that anyone can be sure about. The questions raised in those kinds of scenarios aren't about calculation, but about modeling. For example, if you believe that there is a large amount of methane trapped in the arctic permafrost, and you believe that temperatures above a certain range release this much faster than in the past, and you believe that methane warms the climate rapidly, then you would tend to believe that the runaway scenarios are plausible. AI can't tell us whether the methane is there (we have to go measure it, though maybe AI can make the measurement more accurate), and can't tell us how temperature will affect the release rate (again, we have models of this, but they rely on different assumptions, and we have to go measure to find out which are right).
Can AI provide better simulations of the impacts of interventions on both climate and the economy, to inform decision making?
Maybe. Agent-based modeling can help with this to some degree, and is arguably part of AI. In fact, it already has been to some degree, by Beeger &amp; Troost in J. Agriculture Economics, in 2014 and again in 2017, though interest in this kind of modeling looks like a pretty new development in this area. Although ABM can give us reasonable models and help simulate the impact of interventions, ultimately they are just one modeling tool among many. Their potency may improve if more realistic agent models are used, but it is not clear that AI is going to provide advances in this area in the near future.
Automation of climate planning so that the harmful effects of the irresponsibility of one geopolitical entity wishing to industrialize without constraint on other geopolitical entities can be mitigated
Probably not. Although AI techniques have made some kinds of economic planning problems a lot easier, the main barrier to the effects you describe is a social/political one: countries are sovereign, and the world operates as a de facto anarchy (i.e. the UN is impotent). Your AI model can tell, say, India not to industrialize, but Indians want to enjoy the same kind of lifestyle improvements that Americans do, and would rather enjoy them sooner than later. India would collectively rather that Americans put an enormous tax on their carbon emissions, drive less, eat much, much less beef, and stop flying everywhere, than that Indians continue living on the equivalent of $7,000 each per year. In contrast, Americans would rather that Indians just wait a few decades while the developed world decarbonizes, and only industrialize once we have enough solar panels to replace all our current needs within current industrial economies.
Basically this is a resource allocation problem within an anarchy: we can only burn X carbon within Y time, everyone wants to burn some, and the only way to enforce contracts is with the threat of massive violence (or massive economic sanctions, which in turn, are imposed through the threat of violence against other actors if they trade with the sanctioned country). AI can help us answer questions like &quot;How much should the USA pay India in exchange for India not industrializing this year?&quot;, see, e.g. work in Auction Theory, but AI can't actually make nations do those things if they can't reach a diplomatic compromise.